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Rod Dreher, who may have finally dropped the "Crunchy Con" nom de plume, second in ridiculousness only to Theodore Beale's, has praise for religiously conservative Rep. Mark Souder, who is resigning from Congress because he got caught with his penis in places not associated with his wife. Dreher gives this reason for acclaim:

[W]e find that a big Christian conservative has betrayed his family and his God by committing adultery, a thing both sad and appalling. So why am I writing in praise of Mark Souder? Because of the admirable and (therefore) unusual way he's dealing with it. He's not holding on to his seat at all costs. He's not issuing a pro forma apology of the sort we're used to hearing from politicians. He's resigning his seat because he doesn't want to put his family through hell in the public spotlight, and because he doesn't want to hurt his party.

At first blush, that did not seem unreasonable, especially given the reactions of other socially conservative luminaries who were of late caught, in Lauri Lebo's hilarious summary, in situations involving "adult diapers, wide stances or non-consensual tickling."

As Lebo pointed out, Souder appeared in the execrable Expelled but much smarter people than the average Congress-stooge ... Thomas Nagel leaps to mind ... have been fooled by the Discoveryoids.

But then Ed Brayton reminded me of the fact that Souder used taxpayer-supplied resources to produce a phony "report" on Richard Sternberg's equally phony claims of martyrdom at the hands of the Smithsonian Institute. No one abusing his office in this manner can be considered admirable.

Lebo puts the nail in that coffin anyway:

Souder had touted himself as a conservative "family values" politician and tireless advocate for abstinence-only-until-holy-union-of-marriage public school education. This certainly raises the question that if an aging white-haired paunchy married grandfather can't keep his pants zipped, why for God's sake should we expect teenagers?

Stupid obliviousness is not worthy of praise. Of course, the video Ed provides, where Souder and his mistress join to extol abstinence is just hypocrisy icing on the cake.
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